When
Evo Morales won Bolivia’s national
elections, becoming the first indigenous president in South American
history,
the international left almost unanimously hailed this as a victory for
the
oppressed. Yet as the League for the Fourth International (LFI) warned
before,
during and after the December 2005 elections, political support to
Morales’
regime of “Andean capitalism” is counterposed to the most fundamental
interests
of the workers, peasants and indigenous peoples. Below is an expanded
version
of the presentation by Abram Negrete at a forum of the Internationalist
Group
(U.S. section of the LFI) in New York City on May 7.

Evo Morales’ government in
Bolivia is now approaching a year and a half in power. Understanding
what this
government is and is not, what it has and has not done, is important
for
understanding the situation not only in Bolivia but in Latin America as
a
whole.

The Morales government has
posed again, in some cases very sharply, the questions of reform or
revolution
and the nature of social change in Latin America; the relation between
democratic issues and the class struggle; the question of how to fight
against
the oppression of indigenous peoples that goes back to the inception of
Spanish
colonialism in Latin America. It poses anew the question of how to
defeat and
uproot imperialist oppression, not just in Bolivia and the Andes, but
throughout
Latin America.

To put it another way, an
understanding of the situation in Bolivia and what the Evo Morales
government
represents raises all the questions addressed by Leon Trotsky’s program
of
permanent revolution, a phrase that is featured on the flyer for
today’s
program. That is, the conception that to resolve each of the issues
that I’ve
mentioned in favor of the oppressed, the working class must take power
at the
head of the poor peasantry and the exploited layers of the urban
population,
seizing the land and industries in a socialist
revolution, that in order to survive must extend itself throughout
Latin
America and into the United States, which is the dominant military,
political
and economic power in this hemisphere.

A History of Upheaval

One of the most interesting
things about Bolivia, and one of the reasons it’s important to look at
the
current situation, is that Bolivia has been a testing ground for the
validity
of just about every kind of political program in Latin America. This
includes
the oligarchic rule of the Liberal elite at the beginning of the 20th
century;
something called “military socialism” in the late ’30s, with its
different
flavors of populism; the classic populist regime that came to power in
1952
under the leadership of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement
(MNR – Movimiento
Nacionalista Revolucionario); the guerrilla strategy of Che Guevara in
the
1960s; military dictatorships and civilian neoliberal regimes. And now
a
government that claims to represent a particularly “indigenist”
standpoint,
that is, one that supposedly uniquely reflects the interests and
outlook of the
indigenous masses. These are some of the different recipes for managing
Bolivian society that have been attempted.

In that sense, because of
the convulsiveness of Bolivian society, because of the sharpness with
which all
social issues are posed, it has also been a laboratory or testing
ground for
the validity of the conceptions of the permanent revolution posed first
by Leon
Trotsky in the context of the Russian revolutions of 1905, February
1917 and
October 1917. This revolutionary program stands opposed to all the
recipes for
tinkering with capitalism, from the “two-stage revolution” schemas
pushed by
Stalin to all the varieties of bourgeois nationalism, whether they
dress in a
three-piece suit or indigenous attire.

Bolivia is the poorest
country in South America and the second poorest in the hemisphere; only
Haiti
is poorer. By most calculations it is the most indigenous country in
Latin
America, with about 62 percent of the population referring to or
categorizing
itself as indigenous and most of the population speaking as its first
language
either Quechua, which was the language of the Incas, or Aymara, the
language of
some of the people who have lived in that region since before the Incas
conquered it, or Tupi-Guaraní, a complex of languages mainly in
the eastern
regions.

The indigenous population
includes the overwhelming majority of the peasantry and has been
historically
excluded and oppressed in the most brutal ways. During the heyday of
the old
regime in Bolivia before the revolution of 1952, if you picked up a
newspaper
and opened it on just about any day, you could see pictures of Indian
people in
chains being turned over to the authorities, with a caption about
“savages”
being imprisoned for infringing this or that regulation. Until the 1952
revolution, indigenous people were often not allowed to enter many of
the main
plazas and streets of La Paz and other cities.

From out of this indigenous
peasantry there arose a working class, centered on the tin miners. It
was – and
continues to be, despite premature announcements of its supposed demise
– one
of the most militant proletarian sectors in the hemisphere, which has
overthrown one government after another. Its political outlook has been
shaped
in part, in incomplete and contradictory ways, by concepts derived from
Marxist
class politics.

In 1952, Bolivia
experienced what was called the National Revolution. This was the most
extensive revolution in Latin America between the Mexican Revolution of
1910-17
and the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The 1952 revolution nationalized
Bolivia’s
main tin mines and, under enormous pressure from the peasantry, carried
out a
land reform. For the first time, it gave the vote to the majority of
the population,
which had been excluded on the pretext that you had to be able to read
and
write – in Spanish – in order to vote. There had been very few schools
in the
countryside and the elite had no interest whatsoever in the indigenous
majority
learning to read and write. Quite the contrary.

Despite the tin mine
nationalization, the land reform and the formal enfranchisement of the
indigenous majority, the 1952 National Revolution did not in fact
resolve any
of Bolivia’s main problems. It did not break its subordination to
imperialism,
particularly United States imperialism, which soon rebuilt a murderous
army for
the Nationalist government. It did not lift the country out of its
poverty. It
did not resolve the question of the land, nor did it change in a
fundamental
way the racist oppression of the indigenous majority; and it not change
the
fact that Bolivian miners, as was the case at the beginning of the 20th
century, continued and still continue to die on average before the age
of 40 because
their lungs are shredded by what they call the mal de mina
(mine sickness), which is silicosis and basically makes
you drown in your own blood.

I do not want to read a
long list of facts and figures, but a few may give you an idea of the
situation. According to the World Bank, over half of indigenous
Bolivians live
in what it calls extreme poverty; in the rural areas this rises to 72
percent.
The average income for indigenous people lucky enough to have a job is
US$63 a
month, compared to the average wage for non-indigenous people of US$140
a
month. So we are talking, literally, about starvation wages. Indigenous
women
workers face an unendurable triple oppression that really cannot be
affected by
the kind of timid reforms proposed by reformist organizations.

As for the land, one
hundred families own 25 million hectares of land (that’s about 100,000
square
miles). Meanwhile, two million work five million hectares of land
(under 20,000
square miles). In other words, even after the land reform carried out
and
trumpeted by the Nationalist regime that took power in 1952, the
concentration
of land in the hands of the wealthy has been spectacular. The land
hunger of
the poor peasantry remains a pressing issue.

Thus it is no accident,
given such conditions together with the protagonism of the
indigenous-derived
miners in national life, that Bolivia was a country where movements
claiming
allegiance to Trotskyism gained more influence than anywhere else on
the
continent. We will be talking more about this soon.

Morales’ Election No
Victory for the Exploited

So what about Evo Morales?
Everyone here probably remembers the coverage he got from different
parts of
the political spectrum when he won the December 2005 presidential
election.
Predictably, big-business newspapers denounced him as representing part
of what
they called a general “lurch to the demagogic left” in Latin America,
as the New York Times (24 December 2005) put
it. For its part, the international left was bubbling over with
enthusiasm for
“Evo,” saying that he represented a new kind of radicalism, even a new
kind of
socialism – a new, non-Marxist, non-class, special kind of radicalism.

They saw him as part of a
supposed left-wing realignment in Latin America that included
Venezuela’s Hugo
Chávez, a very vocal supporter of Evo Morales, and Lula’s
popular-front government
in Brazil. Morales also had the support of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, as we
saw at
the beginning of tonight’s forum in video footage that included “Fidel
and Evo”
going around shaking hands, kissing babies and so forth. According to
this
view, the realignment also included populist-flavored bourgeois regimes
in
Argentina, Ecuador, Peru and elsewhere.

People who put forward
this enthusiastic vision of Evo Morales pointed to the fact, which is
indeed
significant, that he is the first indigenous president in South
America. He is
not, as some claim, the first indigenous president in Latin America as
a whole:
that was Benito Juárez in Mexico, almost a century and a half
before Morales.
And they point to the fact that “Evo,” who is mainly known by his first
name in
Bolivia, became a political figure as leader of indigenous peasants who
were
fighting to defend what they view as their right – and what we as
revolutionaries very emphatically view as their right – to cultivate
the coca
leaf and sell it to whomever they can find to buy it.

The
peasant unions fought, sometimes in the face of enormous repression, to
defend
that right to grow and sell the coca leaf, in the face of the United
States’
so-called war on drugs. This “war” is a pretext not only for repression
in the
ghettos and barrios here in the U.S. but for military intervention in
many
countries of Latin America, including Bolivia. And it has included the
forcible
eradication of coca crops, sometimes by Bolivian troops on their own,
sometimes
together with U.S. “advisors” and soldiers.

With the social base he
developed among the coca-growing peasants in particular, Morales formed
a
nationalistic political party, first called the Political Instrument
for the
Sovereignty of the Peoples and then adopting the name MAS (Movimiento
al
Socialismo–Movement Towards Socialism). As running mate in one of his
early
presidential campaigns he chose Antonio Peredo, brother of Coco and
Inti
Peredo, two famous guerrilla combatants who had fought with Che Guevara.

In
his most recent, successful presidential campaign, Morales’ candidate
for vice
president was the country’s most prominent leftist intellectual,
Álvaro García
Linera, who was once a member of the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army, named
after
the Aymara rebel who led a major uprising at the end of the 18th
century that
encircled the city of La Paz. That rebellion is still on the minds of
almost
all sectors of Bolivian society. Two years ago, when I was there during
the
overthrow of then-president Carlos Mesa, rich people who considered
themselves
part of the “white” elite were talking fearfully about what happened
during the
Tupac Katari rebellion of 1781 and indigenous people were talking
proudly about
the 1781 uprising. This history is still very much a part of the
country’s
political vocabulary.

In any event, Morales chose
as his running mate this intellectual who had been imprisoned for quite
a
while, was badly tortured because of his participation in the guerrilla
movement named after Tupac Katari, and subsequently became a
social-democratic-tinged ideologue of the MAS political party.

During the 2002 elections,
the U.S. embassy had inadvertently boosted Morales’ popularity when it
openly
warned against voting for him. You can see some of this in the recent
film Our Brand Is Crisis.1 In Bolivia the
American ambassador has
traditionally acted as an imperial proconsul, whose approval was needed
for
just about everything. If he said “don’t do that,” ministers and
presidents
were expected to obey, or else. But when U.S. spokesmen repeatedly
attacked
Morales as a supposed narco-terrorist, this backfired and strengthened
his
credentials as somebody seen as an anti-imperialist. In the December
2005
elections he won by an absolute majority, with 54% of the vote,
something quite
unheard-of in Bolivian elections. This was an indication of the degree
of
popularity he had gained among the indigenous population in particular.

Now according to most of
the left internationally, Morales’ election was a victory of the Indian
population, of the Bolivian peasantry and the laboring masses in
general. They
pointed to his wide popularity among that majority, who hoped he would
fulfill
their aspirations for fundamental social change. At the same time, a
number of
writers in the big-business press worried that if Morales didn’t make
some
serious changes pretty quickly, he could be outflanked on the left,
with
sections of his social base becoming more radical and impatient with
the pace
of change.

With few exceptions, most
currents on the left claimed that Morales’ victory was a victory of the
working
people of Bolivia. We – as Trotskyists, as Marxists – went very
strongly
against that rosy view of Evo Morales. We said, on the contrary,
before, during
and after the election, that his government would notin any sense be
socialist. We said that it would betray the aspirations of the
indigenous majority;
it would emphatically not represent
the interests of the Indian population of Bolivia, the working class,
or the laboring
and exploited population in general.

The League for the Fourth
International (LFI) emphasized that the government of Evo Morales would
not and
could not defeat the aggressive racist campaign waged against the
indigenous
peoples of the altiplano (the high
plateau around La Paz, Oruro and the main mining regions) by the elite
sectors
concentrated in the eastern part of the country and centered on the
agribusiness interests of the Santa Cruz “department” or province.

Not only would Evo’s
government not free the country from imperialism, we insisted, but in
fact the
new government would act as an enforcer
for imperialism and the rule of private property, in other words of the
ruling
class in Bolivia itself. In Marxist terms, despite the illusions spread
about
it, this would not be some sort of indefinite regime or hemi- semi-
demi-radical/whatever government with no class character. It would be a
bourgeois government.

This assertion produced
gasps of horror at our alleged sectarianism, ingrained intransigence
and
stubborn unwillingness, through sheer cussedness and overall nasty
ultraleftism,
one supposes, to recognize this “victory” and the supposed radicalism
of the
Morales regime. We stated in the publications of the LFI, The
Internationalist and El
Internacionalista, that we would not give a single vote to Evo and
would
have absolutely no confidence in his government; on the contrary, we
would
present a revolutionary opposition to that government.

We pointed out that Álvaro
García Linera, an elegant figure often seen in the fashionable
cafés of La Paz,
had coined a special phrase to describe the program of the MAS. He said
it
stood for something called “Andean capitalism,” a very special kind of
capitalism adapted to the high altitude and special conditions and
cultural
milieu of the Andes. Sometimes they would add the lowland areas and
call it
“Andean and Amazonian capitalism” (see “Bolivian Elections: Evo Morales
Tries
to Straddle an Abyss,” The Internationalist
No. 23, April-May 2006). Morales’ vice-presidential running mate said
that because
of the nature of Bolivia, this Andean capitalism would last for many
decades,
maybe even a hundred years.2

García Linera is not a
neophyte in politics, he is a top-flight intellectual who is famously
prolific
in his reading and his writing, so he justified this in the vocabulary
of those
who claim to have gone beyond Marxism to some higher, “postmodern”
plane. One
of the venues was at a university in Mexico City where he gave a speech
and
some of our comrades had a kind of debate with him from the floor.
García
Linera said, listen, you have to understand that there is no more
working class
in Bolivia – a claim that is echoed, surprisingly enough, by one
international
tendency that calls itself Trotskyist, as we will see. What you’ve got
to
understand, he said, is that in Bolivia there is no class
struggle any more; instead we have the action of “the multitudes,” las multitudes, which have no
particular class character, and this is actually a really good thing.
So these
multitudes or ever-shifting, amorphous masses have replaced the clash
of class
against class.

These are some of the
rhetorical devices that are swallowed hook, line and sinker by a
significant
number of ex-leftists. Anyone who recognizes that class struggle does
go on is
denounced as a dogmatic doctrinaire, and those who persist in
participating in
it are liable to find themselves repressed (undogmatically, no doubt)
by the
police and armed forces.

The MAS promised that
Bolivia’s problems would be resolved by calling a Constituent Assembly,
that
is, a convention to rewrite the constitution for the nth
time – Bolivia has had a lot
of constituent assemblies throughout its history. Evo Morales and his
followers
said that in some unstated way, this Constituent Assembly would refundar el país (refound the country).
Today they say this is part of a “democratic and cultural revolution,”
which
they sometimes subdivide into “four revolutions,” consisting of a
supposed
agrarian reform, fomenting “Andean capitalism” rather than the
“neoliberal
model,” reformulating educational policy, and so on.

When the government reached
its one-year mark García Linera thought it was a good time to
underline that
the so-called revolution “will continue its work so long as we can
guarantee
the support of workers, small businessmen, peasants, businessmen, the
Armed
Forces and Police” (La Razón, La Paz,
31 December 2006). In other words, so long as they can subordinate the
working
people to their exploiters and the armed forces that have carried out
so many
massacres to defend their rule. So no, this is not four revolutions, or
one
revolution, or any kind of revolution at all; it is a bourgeois
nationalist
regime.

How Evo Morales Proved
His Usefulness to the Bourgeoisie

We have stressed that to
understand the nature of Evo’s government, it’s essential to understand
how and why he came to power. How do you
explain that the leader of coca-growing peasants, who had been
demonized by the
U.S. ambassador and the Bolivian right, was able to take the
presidency? This
was a result of convulsive social struggles starting in the year 2000
with the
so-called Water War in Cochabamba, where the right-wing governor of the
departamento (province) tried to
privatize the city’s water system, leading to massive protests.
Particularly
key were what came to be known as Gas Wars I and II, which we covered
extensively in several articles in The
Internationalist No. 17 (October-November 2003) and No. 21 (Summer
2005).

The first Gas War broke out
in October 2003 to protest contracts signed with international oil and
gas
conglomerates by the right-wing president Gonzalo Sánchez de
Lozada, known as
“Goni.” These contracts basically gave away Bolivia’s gas wealth to
hated
international energy giants. There were huge protests which were met
with massive
repression. In previous forums we’ve showed some of the video footage
where you
could see the army firing on unarmed demonstrators from the hills,
shooting
dozens of people down. During these protests the country went to the
edge of
civil war. The question of a workers revolution was posed. This was not
our
deduction or interpretation, but something that was talked about in the
streets, in the markets, on the radio, in the press. The miners played
a
central role in fighting against the right-wing government with its
troops and
police.

Here is where we begin to
get an answer to the question I just asked. During the events of
October 2003
Evo Morales and his party, the MAS, performed a crucial service for the
Bolivian ruling class and its North American backers. The MAS played a
key role
in easing the transition from Goni to his vice president, who had the
same
politics but a softer image. This was Carlos Mesa, who happens to be a
prominent historian and journalist and was seen as a liberal
intellectual. And then
Morales and the MAS helped prop up Carlos Mesa in power.

But when Mesa’s government,
continuing Goni’s basic policies, promulgated a new gas and oil law,
the
protests renewed in Gas War II. In May and June 2005, massive protests
and
street fighting broke out, spearheaded, once again, by the miners.
Indigenous
peasants, poor people from the cities and students grouped themselves
around
the miners, who used their dynamite to defend themselves against army
sharpshooters and military police. There was an enormous polarization
of the
country: the Santa Cruz elite, grouped around hard-line right-wing
politicians
who were trying to take over the presidency, vowed to meter
bala: to shoot bullets into the Indian masses. They sharply
escalated racist rhetoric against the indigenous population, whom they
denounced as savages and barbarians.

The country was once again
on the edge of a civil war, culminating in the demonstrators driving
Congress
out of the capital: the Bolivian parliament had to run away from La
Paz! Congress
tried to set up shop in Sucre, one of the other main cities, where they
were
going to proclaim a right-wing government and perhaps a new state of
siege. It
came to a head when miners and peasant contingents were converging on
Sucre and
Juan Carlos Coro Mayta, a mine cooperative leader, was assassinated by
an army
sniper. I heard nightly discussions: is there going to be a military
coup, is
there going to be a civil war in the full sense, what are the
conditions that
could lead to a revolution, there is no revolutionary leadership at
this point
that could defeat the bourgeoisie and carry out a successful uprising,
and so
forth.

At that moment Evo Morales
and the MAS stepped in, as mediators to cool the situation out for the
ruling
class with another transition to yet another president from the same
bloc of
parties that had been in power. They wound up turning the presidency
over to
the head of the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the leaders of the slum
dwellers’
associations of El Alto (the large, mainly Aymara working-class city
just above
La Paz), and the leaders of the El Alto regional labor confederation,
organized
a kind of side show. Together with people from the various left
parties,
including those who call themselves Trotskyists, they pulled together
something
they called the Asamblea Popular (People’s Assembly) and then the
Asamblea
Popular Nacional Originaria (National and Indigenous People’s Assembly)
or
APNO.

During its brief existence,
the APNO provided a platform for radical speeches and revolutionary
rhetoric,
but at the crucial moment the assembly’s main leaders helped the MAS
turn over
the reigns of power to the new president, who agreed to call early
elections.
Not accidentally, the leader of the El Alto slum dwellers’ association,
Abel
Mamani (who had been presented as a hero internationally by much of the
left),
was rewarded with a cabinet post when Evo Morales was elected six
months later.
He is a minister without portfolio, responsible for water. These guys
showed
they could chill the situation out for the ruling class. So half a year
after
the upsurge of May-June 2005 they were brought in to do just that. This
was not
a risk-free gamble for the bourgeoisie, since it did raise a lot of
expectations among the indigenous poor, but the traditional parties had
burned
themselves out and the ruling class needed new faces in office to keep
the old
order from going under.

Gestures, Rhetoric and
Reality

Evo
Morales (at right) in ceremony before his inauguration, at pre-Inca
ruins of Tiawanaku, 21 January 2006.
(Photo: David Mercado/Reuters)

Morales took office with a
series of symbolic gestures. In a video of his inauguration, which is
sold at
market stalls around the country, you get a look at how he changed the
presidential outfit when he took office. You wouldn’t believe how big a
deal
was made out of this. Instead of wearing a regular three-piece suit, he
had
some patches of Andean textiles sewn in. He had many, many pictures
taken with
Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. Before the official swearing-in,
he went to
Tiawanaku, the pre-Inca ruins shown in the video, and had a ceremony
with yatiris (Aymara priests). At his
inauguration, he spoke about the historic oppression of native peoples
in
Bolivia, and called for a minute of silence for Manco Inca, the last
Inca
ruler, killed by Spanish conquistadors after an unsuccessful rebellion;
Tupac
Katari, whom I mentioned earlier; Tupac Amaru, leader of a major
uprising in
colonial Peru; Che Guevara, and many others.

But in this same speech,
after talking about the centuries of racist oppression dating back to
the
Spanish conquest, he went out of his way to give “a special greeting to
the
Prince and, above all, a special greeting to the Queen.” Guess which
prince and
queen? Of Spain. He told about visiting the royal family in Spain; it
was cold
there, and he caught a cold. Then he went to the queen and she got him
some
cold medicine. And so she went “from Queen to doctor for Evo Morales,
thank you
so much,” he said in his inaugural speech. So even at the symbolic
level, you
can see the balancing act. Homage to a series of heroes of the struggle
against
oppression. And then he turns around and makes special homage to his
friend,
the Queen of Spain.

It makes you want to say: Hello,
who was it that carried out the
Conquest? Who exactly carried out what Marx [in Capital]
called the “enslavement and entombment in mines of the
indigenous population,” leading, according to some estimates, to the
death of
five to six million in the mines of Potosí alone? It was under
the rule of the
Spanish Crown. Only after centuries did it gave way to United States
imperialism
as the dominant oppressor. So there was a point to Evo’s anecdote: he
was
telling the imperialists, especially those of Europe (who have had to
become
more sophisticated than their U.S. rivals) not to take the
anti-colonial discourse
too seriously.

Among the other symbolic
gestures Morales made when taking office, he named a former maid as
minister of
justice; he appointed as ambassador to France the great Quechua singer
from
Norte Potosí, Luzmila Carpio. He cut his own salary and that of
the vice
president and ministers. His foreign minister made some demagogic
statements,
like saying school children should get coca instead of milk for
breakfast.
These were like the former Ecuadoran populist president Abdala Bucaram
telling
the poor to take bottle caps and scratch rich people’s limousines:
posturing that
might irritate the upper crust and win some cheap popularity but was
not to be
taken seriously. In his second cabinet, named at the beginning of this
year,
Morales brought many leftists into the government, including several
from the
pro-Moscow as well as the Maoist Communist parties, plus former leaders
of the
miners’ union and of the COB labor federation. So he put faces from a
range of
“popular movements” into his cabinet.

In populist style, he used
these and other symbolic gestures and rhetoric to dress up actions that
serve
the ruling class. As soon as he took power, he emphasized that he would
respect
what in Latin America is called the “institutionality of the armed
forces,” in
other words the armed forces and officer corps would remain intact.
This is
particularly important if you remember that in Chile, the first thing
Salvador
Allende did when he was elected president in 1970 – as the head of the
Unidad
Popular, a “popular front” of class collaboration – was to swear to
maintain
the “institutionality of the armed forces,” which then turned around
and
overthrew him on 11 September 1973. In Bolivia, the armed forces have
carried
out innumerable massacres and military coups, so many that the country
was
nicknamed Golpilandia (Coup-Land).

This brings up another of
Evo’s gestures: the “Juancito Pinto Bond.” Towards the end of his first
year in
office he decreed a twice-yearly payout, equivalent to twenty-five U.S.
dollars, for school children in the first five grades of primary
school. This
is modeled on the “Hope Bond” distributed to school children by the
former
mayor of El Alto, who was driven out of power for siding with the Santa
Cruz
Oligarchy, and the “Solidarity Bond” for pensioners implemented by the
right-wing government of Goni. Juancito Pinto was a twelve-year-old
drummer boy
who died in 1880 during the Pacific War, when Bolivia lost its seacoast
to
Chile. This may look like sappy sentimentalism but it is actually an
appeal to
the revanchist anti-Chilean nationalism that has been whipped up by one
bourgeois government after another to divert struggle away from the Bolivian ruling class. Further
underlining his efforts to cozy up to the military, Morales had the
armed
forces distribute the money to the kids.

This brings me to something
else Morales did as soon as he was elected at the end of 2005. Right
away he
made a pilgrimage to Santa Cruz, the bastion of the hard-line
oligarchy, to
meet with the right-wing business leaders and say, “I don’t want to
expropriate
or confiscate any property.” Instead, he said, “I want to learn from
the
entrepreneurs” (Página 12, Buenos Aires, 28 December
2005). This is the
same business elite that was calling for Indian blood just a few months
before,
to shoot down the indigenous protesters on the altiplano. They have
their own
fascistic goon squads called the Juventud Cruceñista (Santa
Cruzist Youth),
which beat indigenous demonstrators bloody if they try to enter Santa
Cruz, and
have kept it largely union-free.

So beyond the gestures,
these are now substantial matters. When Morales met with the elite in
Santa
Cruz, they said: Listen Evo, you want to talk turkey, you want to make
nice?
OK, put your money where your mouth is. We want a bunch of things, but
the
first thing we want is the biggest iron and manganese deposit in the
world,
which happens to be in Bolivia, in a place called El Mutún. They
said: If you
want to cooperate and “learn from” us, here’s what we want you to do:
privatize
it. So Evo said: You got it. The government promptly announced that it
would
privatize Mutún, add a bunch of subsidies for international
investors, and turn
over this source of wealth which could, under a workers and peasants
government, be used for the working people. Eventually the contract to
exploit
Mutún was awarded to a company from India.

Agrarian “Reform”
Strengthens Landowners’ Power

The next measure was what
Morales and García Linera falsely called an agrarian reform or
“revolution,”
part of the supposed “four revolutions” trumpeted by their government.
As shown
in detail by the leftist Latin American Development Studies Center
(CEDLA) in
Bolivia, this supposed reform actually serves to consolidate the power
of big
landlords and agribusiness companies. I’ve mentioned the concentration
of land
in the hands of the rich and how little is in the hands of the poor
peasantry.
This situation is actually exacerbated
by the current “reform,” which is explicitly a continuation of the
Agrarian
Reform Law enacted by Goni, the hated right-wing, “neoliberal”
president overthrown
in 2003. Goni’s 1996 law is the basis of Morales’ supposed agrarian
reform,
except that Morales’ supposed reform is more
favorable to agribusiness than even Goni’s was.

This
is important, since the peasantry remains a large section of the
population
(about 35 percent of the population lives in the countryside, less than
in
previous times, partly due to the growth of towns like El Alto, but
still a
large sector). Moreover, it is Evo Morales’ historic base, while export
agriculture is one of the biggest sources of wealth and power for the
Bolivian
bourgeoisie. What happens with the land says a lot about what is really
going
on under this new government.

The Morales agrarian reform
takes a category from Goni’s 1996 law called FES or “social economic
function,”
a unit of production used as the definition of properties that are not
to be
touched by any agrarian reform measures. And it turns out that the FES
category
includes virtually all the lands
owned by agribusiness concerns. These huge farms for soy and other
commodities
will not be touched. In addition, the new version of the law broadens
the definition
of the FES to cover not only lands being cultivated or lying fallow in
order to
recover their productivity, but even those included in what it calls
“projected
growth.”

If you’re a huge landowner,
all you have to say is: Hey, I project that my business is going to
grow onto
that land and I will use it at some point. If you do that, your land
cannot be
touched. But what if part of their land falls within a category that
theoretically could be redistributed?
The “reform” gives landowners seven years to sanear las
tierras, to rearrange ownership, find a frontman, or get
around it in one or another way. Only after seven years would they have
to
respond to any hypothetical proposals to give out their land.

The agribusiness properties
are particularly concentrated in the department of Santa Cruz. In many
cases it
was the government, during years of subsidies to Santa Cruz, that gave
these
properties to the landowners. Concretely, 60
percent of the productive land is in Santa Cruz. Meanwhile, if
you’re an
agricultural worker you get beaten to a pulp if you even try to form a
union
there, and this region has been the staging ground for military coups
for many
decades.

So what is the Morales
government doing with regard to the needs of the peasantry, its
historic base?
Not only is it not fulfilling those needs, it is strengthening the
power of the
big landlords, and this is not just an economic question. It is a
social, political
and military question directly linked
to the fight against racism. Large landed property used for export
agribusiness: that is the basis of the political and military power of
many of
the most violent enemies of the Indian masses in Bolivia, the Santa
Cruz elite
in particular. That’s where they get their money and their power. If
you refuse
to touch their land, if you strengthen their control of it and even
give them
the ability to increase their wealth, you are not only not
solving the problems of the indigenous masses, you are
strengthening those who threaten to shoot them down whenever they
protest.

So if you want to know what
is meant by “Andean capitalism,” this
is what it means. Meanwhile, peasants have been trying to resist the
program of
coca eradication, which has not stopped under Evo Morales, despite the
fact
that he got his start by opposing it. When I was there a few months
ago, I
talked to coca-growing peasants who were on a hunger strike across from
the
presidential palace in central La Paz, the Palacio Quemado. They were
protesting against Morales and accusing him of continuing the U.S.
policy of
eradicating coca fields. They had posters with photos of fields that
had been
burned up by the army under Evo’s orders. And they were protesting the
killing
of two coca-growing peasants who were shot down in the Carrasco region
when it
was invaded by an army/police task force last October.

Fake Gas and Oil
Nationalization

One year ago, the measure
that made the biggest splash internationally was the supposed
nationalization
of Bolivia’s natural gas and oil. This was a high-profile event, in
which
Morales sent troops to stand outside the oil fields and refineries. He
made a
big speech on May Day 2006, saying that he was returning the historic
patrimony
of the Bolivian people by supposedly nationalizing the “hydrocarbons,”
gas and
oil.

This was a fake
nationalization. Nothing was nationalized, nothing was expropriated,
nothing
was confiscated, nothing was taken over. This was not even a bourgeois
nationalization
like those carried out in the 1930s and ’40s by national-populist
leaders like
Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico. It is interesting to see who
Evo’s Hydrocarbons
Minister was: Andrés Soliz Rada, who came out of a tendency
called Octubre,
linked to Argentine former Trotskyists who backed Peronism. He and his
group
were some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the nationalization of
Gulf
Oil carried out in Bolivia in 1969 by the military regime of General
Alfredo
Ovando. But Soliz Rada wound up resigning his post in the Morales
government in
September of last year, saying he could not go along with the
government’s soft
line towards what he called the “terrible demands” of the international
energy
companies.

Instead of any kind of
nationalization, what Morales did was rearrange the amounts of duties,
taxes
and royalties so the state would get a somewhat higher slice while
leaving the
property in the hands of the so-called multinational (in other words
imperialist) corporations. Our Brazilian comrades wrote a good article
which
exposed the phony character of this supposed nationalization while
denouncing
the threats by Brazilian president Lula and oil giant Petrobras (which
is
particularly concerned to maintain the flow of gas to the São
Paulo industrial
region), and defending Bolivia’s right to take measures regarding its
natural
resources. (See“Fake Gas
Nationalization in Bolivia: For Expropriation under Workers Control,” Vanguarda Operária No. 9, May 2006.)

In late 2006, Morales
negotiated a new contract with the president of Argentina, in which the
Argentine oil company YPFB and its senior partner, the Spanish Repsol
company –
one of the biggest of the international oil-business giants – would get
a
wonderful deal for cheap Bolivian gas at special prices. Not only did
they not nationalize oil and gas, they
strengthened the hand of various imperialist corporations, particularly
Repsol.

The government also raised
taxes on electrical companies, and increased those on mineral exports
from 3
percent to 15 percent, which is still a pittance. But what about the
properties
belonging to the most hated figure in recent Bolivian history, former
president
Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who was the biggest mine owner in the
country? Seizing
them would have been enormously popular; even the opposition parties to
the
right of the MAS would have been hard put to raise much of a hue and
cry
against that. Yet the Morales government did no such thing. Goni quite
tranquilly
sold his properties to international mining concerns, a number of which
unveiled
new mining projects in Bolivia at the end of 2006.

In his “Report on One Year
in Office,” Morales cited statistics including the country’s fiscal
surplus and
that Bolivia’s Central Bank hit new records for international reserves,
partly
because of high natural gas prices on the world market. Behind the
figures was
a significant social and political fact: the Bolivian bourgeoisie was
enjoying
excellent and in some cases exceptional profits, as the new government
fomented
“social stability” through its efforts to lull the masses with populist
rhetoric and promises.

The Constituent
Assembly and Regional Polarization

In June 2005, at one of the
big marches held in the process of overthrowing then-president Carlos
Mesa,
there was a peasant contingent from the tropics of Cochabamba which was
quite
militant. Particularly the women marchers, who were armed with sticks
that had
nails through them and shouted cierren,
cierren (shut down) to all the stores and the people selling items
on the street.
If they didn’t shut down immediately the women would throw pebbles at
them, and
if they still didn’t shut down they would go at them with the sticks
with nails
through them.

I asked their leader what
slogans the contingent was putting forward. He said, “Yesterday it was
nationalization of oil and gas, but today our slogan is a Constituent
Assembly.”
This was in accordance with the orders from the MAS leadership. I asked
him,
“What do you think will come out of this Constituent Assembly?” He
said, “We
are going to refundar el país,”
refound the country. I asked, “What does that mean, what will it do?”
He said,
“We don’t really know, we just know we need to do that, and we’ll find
out what
it means later.” So in some way this Constituent Assembly was supposed
to
resolve the pressing issues through ostensibly democratic mechanisms
and not a
class struggle.

So after coming to power,
Morales held elections to the Constituent Assembly and convened it. As
of now
[May 2007], the assembly has been meeting for eight months. In eight
months it
has produced zero legislation; it has not written or rewritten a single
article
of the constitution. For seven months it debated its own rules of
procedure,
how its meetings would be run. Parts of the social and cultural elite,
including the son of the late union leader Juan Lechín, who is a
prominent
novelist, staged a supposed hunger strike (some reports said they were
getting
fried chicken delivered at night) to demand that the assembly not
approve its
decisions – which it wasn’t making – by a simple majority but instead
by two
thirds, so as to further block the possibility of any reforms. The MAS
zigzagged ridiculously, capitulating even on this terrain and further
emboldening the right.

We had stressed that the
Constituent Assembly was a supposedly democratic diversion that would
not solve
anything. Now what has happened with this talk shop, i.e. nothing,
underlines
that the basic issues in Bolivia cannot be resolved by a “democratic”
charade,
because they are issues of power, money, property and land; of
centuries-old
ethnic and linguistic oppression and discrimination; and they can only
be
resolved by struggle, on a class basis, a revolutionary basis. In other
words,
a struggle to defeat the enemies of
the indigenous masses and drive them from power, for they are not about
to let
themselves be talked out of existence.

One of the expressions of
Indian peoples’ oppression in Bolivia and much of the Andean region is
the
complete lack of language equality, that is, the history of
discrimination
against indigenous languages. Yet today, even the progressive call for
everyone
to learn indigenous languages in the schools has been linked through
the new
education laws to reactionary items on the agenda of the MAS
government, like
weakening university autonomy, which is extremely important throughout
Latin
America, and increasing state control over the teachers’ unions.

The regional polarization
between the Indian west and the eastern and southern regions known as
the media luna (half moon) has been one of
the hottest issues in recent years. An indication of how unequal things
continue to be is that the federal budget for 2007 dedicated nine times
as much
money per inhabitant for Pando, one of the departments that make up the
media luna, as for the department of La
Paz (La Razón, 20 December 2006). The
MAS found itself in a quandary over the provocative demand for
“regional
autonomy” by the racist civic leaders of the media luna,
who take advantage of all the democratic verbiage to make
a pseudo-democratic, actually anti-democratic demand, a power grab to
get even
more of the oil and gas revenue while running the region as their own
private,
“white”-ruled fiefdom. The peasants and poor people who voted for
Morales see
this for the racist ploy that it is and vehemently oppose it.

The MAS, however, has been
all over the map, so to speak, on this question, with Morales
eventually coming
out in support of “autonomy” for the media
luna as part of his conciliation of the Santa Cruz elite. His
supporters
hoped autonomy would be applied to Indian communities and then got
caught in a
trap when a national vote was held on the subject. Autonomy lost on the
national scale, but it won in the media
luna and the referendum specified that it would be applied in those
areas
where it won.

There was a new flare-up
while I was there at the beginning of the year. The prefect or governor
of Cochabamba
is a military man whose father was part of the most bloodthirsty
dictatorship,
the “narco-junta” of Colonel Luis García Meza in the early
1980s. This
governor, Manfred Reyes Villa, was himself trained at the U.S. School
of the
Americas, known as the “School of Assassins,” in Panama. He is a very
provocative, hard-line rightist. He decided to stir things up with a
new
autonomy referendum in Cochabamba as a show of support to the Santa
Cruz
leaders and a provocation against the indigenous peasantry of his own
region.

When Indian demonstrators
came into the city of Cochabamba to protest this, they were met with a
massive
show of force in which gangs of fascistic “white” youth, calling
themselves
Youth for Democracy, met them with metal bars, bats and guns, and
murdered some
of the protestors. These gangs were modeled on the Juventud
Cruceñista, which
according to some reports sent people to Cochabamba and has gotten
back-up from
old-line ultra-rightist and fascist groups like the Bolivian Falange,
which are
experiencing a resurgence. The population of Cochabamba mobilized,
including
many rank and file members of the MAS, which got its start in this
region. They
were on the verge of throwing out Manfred Reyes Villa, one of the worst
enemies
of the indigenous population. But the MAS leadership intervened, saying
no, you
cannot do that, you’re going too far, you have to respect
“institutionality”
and the rules of the game.

Morales Attacks the
Labor Movement

What about the Bolivian
labor movement, which has been at the center of many revolutionary
struggles in
the past and will be in the future? Morales has brought some labor
leaders into
his government, but some leaders of the miners’ union and COB national
labor
federation criticize him. In particular, the leaders of the La Paz
teachers’
union strongly criticize Evo Morales. This union has 20,000 members, is
a
prominent part of the COB, and is led by supporters of the main party
that
identifies itself as Trotskyist, the Partido Obrero Revolucionario
(Revolutionary Workers Party) of Guillermo Lora.

Acutely sensitive to
potential dangers on its left flank, the Morales regime reacted
strongly
against even rhetorical criticism from the COB. It was not enough for
the new
government party, the MAS, that the COB leaders were mainly blowing off
steam
and hot air accompanied by capitulations in practice to the new
bourgeois
regime. They wanted complete obedience.

So in populist style, the
MAS proclaimed it would form a parallel organization to the COB,
bringing
together various “social movements” in a pro-Morales grouping that
called
itself the People’s General Staff (EMP–Estado Mayor del Pueblo). This
included
MAS loyalists, the leaders of the Bolivian Communist Party and others.
They
wanted to make the unions toe the government line, either by
integrating them
into the regime or doing their best to break the unions’ power.
Displaying a
certain amount of hubris, they announced that the EMP would “take
complete
control of the COB” (La Razón, 19
April 2006). Their attempt to do this was short-lived and they had to
recognize
that it flopped, so they turned toward the second option.

Slogans
of pro-government “school councils” say: “Down With the Teachers’
Strike. Death to the Lazy Trots.”
(Photo: El Internacionalista)

The teachers’ union was one
of their main targets, so the MAS first tried running in the union
elections,
but their candidates had a hard time of it. First they ran four
different MAS
slates, because of personal rivalries among their candidates, until
Morales got
on the phone from the presidential palace and told them to run a single
pro-government slate. But they still got very few votes, since their
candidates
had scabbed during the most recent teachers’ strike and had even gone
around to
several schools with the Minister of Education saying the strike was
illegal.

When
they were unable to take over the teachers’ union, the so-called
People’s
General Staff joined with the juntas
escolares, neighborhood “school councils” originally formed by the
party of
ex-dictator Hugo Banzer to act as pro-government shock troops against
the
teachers under a kind of “community control” guise. They held a mass
march on
the teachers’ union hall, with the slogan “Death to the Trotskyist
Teachers!”
Graffiti with such slogans was sprayed on the walls all around the
union hall.
They pounded on the doors of the union hall, which were chained shut,
trying to
invade it and essentially lynch Vilma Plata, Gonzalo Soruco and other
leaders
of the union for criticizing Evo and continuing to carry out strikes.
This was
only stopped when the union managed to get on local radio stations to
call on
workers to oppose this union-busting assault. More recently, at last
month’s
[April 2007] convention of the El Alto Regional Labor Federation, there
was a
physical attack against miners’ leaders and other unionists and
leftists
critical of the pro-Morales leadership of Edgar Patana.

The most spectacular
recent event was the pitched battle that occurred last October in the
mining
center of Huanuni between two groups of miners, the basis for which was
set by
the MAS government. A few years back, the workers at Huanuni, presently
the
most important mine in Bolivia with a long tradition of militancy,
succeeded in
having the mine renationalized through a very important struggle. These
workers
are members of the national mine workers’ union federation, work for
wages
under a union contract, and are employed by the state mining company,
Comibol.
At the same time, there is another sector, called the cooperativist
miners
because they are members of cooperatives that work separate mine
sections and
sell the minerals. Many of these miners are very poor, while other
cooperative
members act like contractors and in effect live off the poorer ones.

The Morales government,
which had received the support of the cooperative leaders, basically
encouraged
them to attack the unionized miners and seize a larger part of the
mountains in
this area for themselves. Vice President García Linera
infamously said that he
was prepared to “send coffins” to Huanuni. The government got their
coffins,
their dead miners on both sides in this conflict. At least 16 miners
died and
dozens were wounded.

But even though the union
miners were in the minority, they defended themselves with dynamite,
and were
actually able to prevail. And then they did a very interesting thing.
Instead
of trying to get vengeance against the ranks of the cooperative miners,
they
did the opposite, saying: Here is what we want to come out of this
situation;
we demand that the state mining company Comibol hire
the cooperativist miners. With this demand they were able to
get approximately 1,500 of those miners hired on, more than doubling
the size
of the unionized workforce at Huanuni. This was a victory for the
working
class, but one that came, as is so often the case in Bolivia, with
miners’
blood.3

The Fight for Genuine
Trotskyism

Because events in Bolivia
give a particularly sharp expression to crucial issues of the class
struggle,
they often highlight important aspects of the fight for revolutionary
leadership. One is the meaning of internationalism itself. Here in the
United
States, the attitude of most of the left has been to tail after Evo
Morales.
Articles by radical groups and leftist academics have focused on the
scope of
social movements, the hopes of the oppressed masses, and the fact that
Morales
is the first indigenous president. These are important facts, but if
you do not
look at the actual content of
political events then you are doing no service, you are just being
liberals.
When they are not engaged in more direct social-patriotic capitulations
to
their “own” ruling class, what passes for international solidarity
among U.S.
leftists is all too often the kind of uncritical enthusing that smacks
of liberal
paternalism.

In contrast, genuine
international solidarity is based on the interests of the only
international
class, the proletariat, and means in the first place telling the truth,
which
requires taking the trouble to find out the real nature of the Morales
regime.
We defend Bolivia, a semi-colonial country oppressed by imperialism,
against
any kind of aggression by the U.S., and we would militarily defend the
Morales
government against imperialism in the event of such attacks. But
telling tall
tales about the supposed revolutionary nature of this bourgeois
government is counterposed to any real struggle
against imperialism.

A striking example of how
misleading reporting can get, when reality is subordinated to tailism,
was the
International Socialist Organization’s coverage of the events that set
the
stage for Evo Morales to win the elections, specifically the fall of
Carlos
Mesa in 2005. The ISO is a social-democratic group, presently the
largest left
tendency on U.S. college campuses, known for supporting Ralph Nader
(who is no
friend of Latin American workers that come here as what he calls
“illegal
aliens”). Their press runs fairly frequent coverage of Bolivia. In June
2005,
as I mentioned, Evo Morales and the leaders of peasant, labor and left
organizations
stole victory from the masses, heading off the threat of revolution by
demobilizing the marches, road blockades and strikes in order to turn
the
presidency over to the head of the Supreme Court. But what was the
headline in
the ISO paper? “Victory in Bolivia!” (Socialist
Worker, 17 June 2005).

While “the fight for
nationalization of gas and oil is not yet resolved,” they wrote, the
“social
movements have delivered a stunning blow to the Bolivian oligarchy and
U.S.
imperialism.” By Goni’s vice president being replaced by the head of
his
Supreme Court? Hardly. The ISO went on to report favorably that the
“issue of
organizing for the Constituent Assembly will take priority for the most
radicalized sectors of the social movements.”

Then there is the Spartacist
League, which unlike the ISO actually used to be Trotskyist. Those days
are
long gone, however, as illustrated very starkly by their position that
a
socialist revolution cannot happen in Bolivia. And why is that?
Because, they
claim, there is no working class there! As you will recall, this
happens to be
the line of Vice President García Linera, for whom “the wish
begets the
thought”: he’d certainly like radical miners and other inconvenient
workers to
be non-existent.

At a New York antiwar march
in April 2006, a member of the Spartacist tendency’s international
leadership
tried to disabuse me of the idea that those workers really exist. He
told me
that after a vigorous search – on the Internet – they’d found,
supposedly, that
no enterprises of more than 150 employees exist in Bolivia. When I
replied that
even a cursory Web search would have disproved this ridiculous claim,
and asked
if they had ever heard of Huanuni and Comibol, he said with a certain
degree of Schadenfreude: “Comibol is kaput.”
According to them, we “conjure
up a proletariat where it barely, if at all, exists” (see “Spartacist
League
Disappears the Bolivian Proletariat,” The Internationalist No.
24,
Summer 2006).

Really, now? An old adage
says nobody is as blind as he who will not see; in this case people who
have
turned historical pessimism and adaptation to the labor aristocracy
into a
political program. This is the opposite
of internationalism. Since the Spartacist League is clearly indifferent
if not
outright hostile to proletarian struggle in Bolivia, it can only be an
embarrassment to them that the Huanuni miners and the rest of the
Bolivian
proletariat keep refusing to go away. For workers in Bolivia, it is
clearly a
good thing that neither the ISO nor the Spartacist League,
revolutionaries in
word only, have the slightest chance of ever having any influence there.

In Bolivia itself, however,
several currents of the left have had a major impact within the workers
movement. This is why the MAS seeks to co-opt those it can and crack
down on
the rest. I mentioned the former Guevarists like Antonio Peredo who are
prominent in the MAS. The Bolivian Communist Party also backs Morales
and
joined his government. They justify this with the old Stalinist schema
of a
“two-stage revolution,” in which Morales heads a “national-democratic”
regime,
supposedly leading the way in some far distant future to a second,
socialist
stage. In reality, the first, “democratic” stage regularly leads to a
massacre
of the workers and peasants. The pro-Moscow Stalinists control the
nationwide
teachers’ federation and at various times were influential in the
miners’ and
factory workers’ unions. They are joined by their not-so-distant
cousins, the
Maoists: Luis Alberto Echazú, long a spokesman for Bolivia’s
small Maoist party
(Partido Comunista Marxista-Leninista), is now the Minister of Mines.

Many current and former
leaders of the COB national labor federation have talked now and again
about
setting up a kind of pressure group on the Morales government, which
they call
an Instrumento Político de los Trabajadores (IPT), political
instrument of the
workers. If this sounds vague, that’s because it is meant to be really
vague. A
“political instrument of the workers” could be just about anything to
anybody,
a sort of amorphous conglomeration that is pointedly not a Marxist,
revolutionary or Trotskyist party. They were joined in this call for an
“IPT”
by one of the smaller groups in Bolivia that identifies itself as
Trotskyist,
the LORCI (Revolutionary Workers League–Fourth International), which
also tried
to set up a “COB Youth” for the bureaucracy. The LORCI is part of the
tendency
led by the Argentine PTS that comes out of the movement of followers of
Nahuel
Moreno.

There is also a small
official Morenoite group in Bolivia (the Movimiento Socialista de los
Trabajadores), which used to brag about being advisors to Evo and is
now a university-based
cheering squad for the COB leadership. From Argentina, the Partido
Obrero of
Jorge Altamira actively campaigned for Evo Morales and sent a
delegation to his
inauguration. This led to the near-dissolution of the small Bolivian
group
aligned with them, the Oposición Trotskysta, which had already
gone through a
series of crises and almost ceased to exist.

The main organization in
Bolivia that calls itself Trotskyist is the POR: the Revolutionary
Workers
Party of Guillermo Lora, whose supporters lead the teachers union of La
Paz.
Historically this party had a significant presence among the miners and
a big
impact on the ideology of the miners’ union, the backbone of the
workers
movement. However, this was conditioned through the POR’s long years of
alliance
with the nationalist leaders of the miners’ union, most importantly
Juan
Lechín. From the 1940s through the ’80s Lechín was the
main leader of the
miners’ union, and then of the COB as well. A member of the nationalist
party
(MNR), he was key to subordinating the workers to the MNR government
that took
power in 1952.

The POR’s alliance with
these leaders was in a sense codified six years before the 1952
revolution,
when the miners’ union approved the famous Tesis
de Pulacayo, the Pulacayo Theses. Written by the POR, this was a
document
of political and ideological orientation for the Bolivian labor
movement. While
it reflected and contributed to working-class radicalization, it
embodied some
dangerous contradictions. The Theses used slogans and demands taken
from
Trotsky’s Transitional Program of the Fourth International, while in a
significant sense it was syndicalist, evading the question of the
revolutionary
party. But this was no accident, and the problem went even deeper,
since the
Theses played an important part in bolstering the supposedly
revolutionary
credentials of nationalist labor
leaders like Lechín, who were members
of a party – the bourgeois-nationalist MNR – and then became a crucial
part of
the MNR government in 1952.

Today the POR strongly
criticizes Evo Morales. To pick one example, their paper Masas
(12 January) ran a front-page headline. It’s a long one:
“Completing One Year in Government, the MAS Reaffirms its Pro-Bourgeois
– That
Is, Counterrevolutionary – Content.” The POR presents itself as the
very
incarnation of Trotskyism, and over the years its ranks have included
many
courageous and self-sacrificing militants. However, this party
demonstrated its
real nature during three major
revolutionary opportunities in Bolivia, when what it did was the
opposite of
fighting for the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution.

The first was the “National
Revolution”: during and for years after 1952, the POR supported
Lechín’s left
wing of the MNR, helping cement illusions in the bourgeois government.
Then,
during the major working-class and student upsurge of 1971, the POR
helped
Lechín form a “People’s Assembly” which served as a
sounding-board for the
left-talking nationalist regime of General Juan José Torres. In
the face of
open preparations for a right-wing coup, this assembly did nothing
to prepare the masses to defend themselves, and then
stopped meeting at all for the seven weeks leading up to the coup.
After the
terrible military coup of August 1971, the POR formed its own popular
front,
the “Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Front,” with the exiled President
Torres,
who had in fact paved the way for the right-wing takeover.

The third time around was
in 1985, when more than 10,000 miners occupied La Paz against the
popular-front
government of Hernán Siles Zuazo, which was applying austerity
measures
dictated by the International Monetary Fund. After opposing the call
for
soviets (workers councils), the POR made another front with
Lechín just at the
moment when he sold out and demobilized the miners, who were soon
punished with
mass mine closures and the vicious program to “relocalize” them and
destroy
their power. In each of these situations, the POR made a bloc with
nationalist
leaders who subordinated the working people to one or another
capitalist
government, and thereby to imperialism.

Labor demonstration in La Paz, March 1985.
At crucial moment, the POR of Guillermo Lora made
political bloc with bourgeois nationalist Juan Lechín, leader of
COB union federation, who again
headed off potential workers revolution. (Photo: Ed Young)

In 2005, during the
overthrow of Carlos Mesa, this pattern was repeated once again. It was
extremely dramatic. The miners were in the streets, hurling dynamite to
defend
themselves against the sharpshooters of the army; thousands of peasants
and
slum-dwellers were streaming into the capital. Yet the position of the
POR was
to call for another “People’s Assembly, like in 1971.” So they formed a
“people’s
assembly,” later renamed the National and Indigenous People’s Assembly
(APNO)
as I mentioned earlier, where the leaders of the labor federations and
neighborhood associations would get up and make all these revolutionary
speeches. Then those leaders helped turn power over to the president of
the
Supreme Court. The POR was seconded in this bloc by the LORCI, which
subsequently played a role in building a union of airport workers in La
Paz,
and sometimes makes leftish criticisms of the POR. However, the LORCI
is
frequently to the right of the POR, as in its abject tailing of the
call for a
constituent assembly, which the LORCI tried to prettify by calling for
a
“revolutionary” constituent assembly.

There is a follow-up to the
story of what the POR, the LORCI and other leftists did with the
“People’s
Assembly.” I mentioned how last year government supporters tried to use
the
“People’s General Staff” to take over the COB in their attempts to
subordinate
the labor movement completely to the government. The man those
government supporters
wanted to take over the COB was Edgar Patana, head of the El Alto labor
federation. Patana had provided crucial services to Morales and the
bourgeoisie
when the government of Carlos Mesa fell in June 2005. And in June 2005,
Patana
was one of the main figures in the “People’s Assembly” using the
radical
rhetoric to defuse the threat of revolution and ease the power
“transition” to
the Supreme Court chief. He was one of the leaders who got a left cover
there
from the POR, the LORCI and the other leftists in that ill-fated
People’s
Assembly (See “Myth and Reality: El Alto and the ‘People’s Assembly’,” The Internationalist No. 21, Summer
2005). They like to use populist, classless references to “the people”
in
general, so they wanted their “People’s” Assembly – and what they got
is this
reactionary “People’s” General Staff, directed against them.
It is just the latest episode of a recurrent
nightmare for the workers and oppressed, which will only end through
building a
real revolutionary leadership, a genuine Trotskyist party.

Bolivia and Permanent
Revolution

I
want to end by emphasizing that the program of permanent revolution is
very
much on the agenda in Bolivia today. This is the urgency of fighting to
build
the nucleus of a Trotskyist party which would actually be able to bring
the
masses’ long-held aspirations to fruition.

On the land question,
rather than a phony agrarian reform, what’s necessary is a real
agrarian
revolution in which the poor peasantry seizes the landed estates and
agribusiness properties, protecting this through self-defense bodies in
close
alliance with the working class of the cities and mining camps. To
defeat the
Santa Cruz elite is no easy matter: what this requires is not
concessions and
more concessions to these hard-core racists, who are quite serious when
they
threaten to shoot down anyone who makes trouble for them. What is
needed is the
organization of workers’ and peasants’
self-defense on a nation-wide basis. It will require the military
defeat
and revolutionary expropriation of those elites, by the working people
of the
altiplano together with the indigenous and mestizo population that
works in the
eastern part of the country and often lacks any union rights or
organization.

All around La Paz and El
Alto, there are many thousands of factory workers, a very large
proportion of
whom are young women. Most of these workers do not have unions. It is
necessary
to massively organize them, but this task will not be carried out by
leaders
subordinate to Evo Morales. It can only be undertaken by a leadership
that is
willing to stand up to his bourgeois government and to present a
class-struggle
program that links unionization to the fight for women’s emancipation
and for
the revolutionary transformation of society as a whole.

The question of gas, oil,
and all the most important resources in the country is a political
question, a
question of power, of which class will rule. Rather than pretending
that Evo
Morales has nationalized the gas, or that this ridiculous farce of a
Constituent Assembly is going to resolve this issue, the League for the
Fourth
International calls for workers control
of the gas and oil, for the workers in those industries and the
proletariat as
a whole to take over these resources and direct them towards the needs
of the
poor and oppressed, and for them to be expropriated
by a workers’, peasants’ and indigenous government. We have seen that
the
“indigenist” theoreticians of “Andean capitalism” are in reality the
latest
enforcers of capitalist rule, which means subjugation to imperialism
and
continued oppression of the indigenous peoples.4
A worker-peasant-indigenous government
is the only kind of regime in which the indigenous masses can actually
seize
and exercise power, undertaking their emancipation as part of an
international
socialist revolution.

Revolution in Bolivia can
be carried through victoriously only as part of an international
struggle. This
is a fundamental aspect of the program of permanent revolution. It is
cut out
of the picture, however, by nationalistic tendencies like the POR,
which
reflect and reinforce Bolivia’s relative isolation. In an oddly
parallel way,
when the formerly Trotskyist SL denies Bolivia’s revolutionary
potential (and
“grooves on” this bizarre denial, to use one of its favorite
expressions), it
blots out the fact that upheavals on the altiplano can help spur
revolutionary
opportunities throughout the region. For both, revolution is more a
rhetorical
reference than a real program.

What
is the regional situation? In Brazil, the industrial powerhouse of
South
America, Lula’s popular-front government has increasingly discredited
itself
among the most militant sectors of the masses, as this coalition of
class
collaboration enriches financiers and industrialists while repressing
workers,
black favela (slum) dwellers and
youth. In Peru, ex-president Alejandro Toledo, a former World Bank
official who
claimed to represent indigenous aspirations, quickly burned out his
popularity
and we have the spectacle of the return of Alan García, the
infamously corrupt
former populist, who is now facing major protests. In Ecuador, after a
series
of Indian uprisings, military officer Lucio Gutiérrez came to
power with the
support of the left, unions and indigenous organizations, who all
joined his
government. As we warned in articles, leaflets and pamphlets, “Lucio”
was a
vicious enemy of the workers and indigenous poor, and soon launched a
crackdown
on the masses. Now there is yet another populist president, Rafael
Correa, who
talks left while the imperialist oil companies continue their
operations, and
the U.S. military continues to operate out the military base at Manta.

In Venezuela, the
left-nationalist government of Hugo Chávez talks about a
“Bolivarian”
revolution and “21st-century socialism,” but this remains a bourgeois
government based on the bourgeois officer corps of the capitalist army.
We
defend Venezuela against U.S.-sponsored coups and aggression, but we do
not
give political support to Chávez. Unlike most of the left, we do
not reduce
events in Venezuela to the ever-changing declarations of Chávez:
some of the
most significant things going on there have to do with a very
significant
radicalization of the working class, the powerful Venezuelan
proletariat which,
under the leadership of a Trotskyist party, has the potential to carry
out a
real socialist revolution. Cuba, meanwhile, continues to be under the
gun of
U.S. imperialism. The Cuban Revolution has survived, but its defense
requires
proletarian political revolution to establish working-class democracy
and the
revolutionary internationalism essential to breaking the island’s
isolation and
extending the revolution.

Here in the United States,
immigrants from Latin America and around the world are an increasingly
important part of working-class struggle, in which, in this country
founded on
slavery, the fight for black liberation is key. This is not just a
general
proposition but the crucial political point that struggles for
immigrant rights
are inseparable from the fight against black oppression, the fight
against the
slave owners’ Democratic Party and for a revolutionary workers party.
As we try
to drive home in protests and mobilizations against the Minuteman
vigilantes
and raids by the migra (immigration
police), this is equally inseparable from the fight to defeat
imperialist war
abroad, which means racist repression “at home.”

The raw material of
revolutionary struggle is present in Latin America. This can be seen in
many
parts of the region, and it keeps cropping up in Bolivia. During the
first anniversary
of Evo Morales’ government, the Bolivian press ran a lot of articles
quoting
representatives of different social sectors on how they saw the
situation. One
of the most interesting comments came from a peasant union leader who
said that
when Evo was elected, poverty-stricken peasants hoped for “a deep-going
change,
but that’s not what happened” (La Razón,
31 December 2006). No it didn’t, but that is still what Bolivia’s poor,
the
working people of the cities and the countryside, hope for, need and
have repeatedly
shown their willingness to fight for. They will have to take it
themselves. The
ruling class of Bolivia and of the U.S. gave Evo Morales the chance to
take
office and stave off a new upsurge of radicalization, and can only
worry that
he may not succeed in doing so.

A
revolutionary
leadership is what’s required, and the real
lessons of the Bolivian experience can help build it on the program of
permanent revolution, with the willingness and determination to swim
against
the stream and fight for genuine communism in Latin America, here in
the United
States and everywhere. n

1 Our Brand Is Crisis
(Rachel Boynton,
2005) is a devastating documentary on the U.S. role in the 2002
Bolivian
elections, showing how the U.S. consulting firm of Democratic
strategist James
Carville (closely linked to Bill and Hillary Clinton) ran right-winger
Gonzalo
Sánchez de Lozada’s successful bid for reelection.

2
The concept
is hardly new. Years before the MAS came to power a “center” party
called
Condepa (Conscience of the Fatherland), led by a populist demagogue who
called
himself el compadre, campaigned for
“endogenous development.” As for García Linera, in a recent
interview (Página 12, Buenos Aires, 11 June) he
reiterated that “Bolivia has a future potential and space for
developing
capitalist production relations.” This would be a new, “productive
capitalism
that recognizes a diversity of economic actors with the capacity to
accumulate:
the traditional business sector, of course, but others too, such as
non-traditional business people who emerge from the popular indigenous
world...and have succeeded in building very interesting mechanisms of
accumulation.”

3
Not long
after this forum was given, a strike broke out at the Huanuni mine. In
early
July, workers blocked the highway to La Paz demanding a wage increase,
a state
monopoly of the sale of minerals, and no more private-sector tin mining
contracts in the Huanuni region. They called on Evo Morales (who was
then engaged
in talks with business leaders of the media
luna) and Vice President García Linera to come to Huanuni
for negotiations.
Instead, the government called the miners “a sector that is becoming a
detriment
to the country” and sent over 800 police, who arrested 30 miners,
injuring 14.
Morales said, “People ask me, ‘Evo, please take a hard line with
highway
blockaders!’” (He was doubtless conscious of echoing what past
presidents said
about the road blockades he used to lead when he was a peasant union
leader.)
The Minister of Mines, a long-time Maoist, denounced the workers for
“causing
serious losses to the Bolivian state” (La
Razón, 6 July). Several days later government troops stopped
a caravan of
buses carrying miners to La Paz. Meanwhile and with no link to the
Huanuni
conflict, important miners’ strikes broke out in Peru and Chile,
showing again
that only a revolutionary leadership can unite the region’s workers,
overcoming
divisions exploited by nationalist demagogues who hark back to the
Pacific War
(1879-84) between Bolivia, Peru and Chile.

4 See
“Marxism
and the Indian Question in Ecuador” (The
Internationalist No. 17, October-November 2003) for an in-depth
discussion
of the struggle against the oppression of indigenous peoples in the
Andes and
our slogan of a worker-peasant-indigenous government.